in Your hand
to avert it. No one threatens the honor and peace of Russia
which might well have awaited the success of my mediation.
The friendship for You and Your country, bequeathed to me
by my grandfather on his death-bed, has always been sacred
to me, and I have stood faithfully by Russia while it was in
serious affliction, especially during its last war. _The
peace of Europe can still be preserved by You if Russia
decides to discontinue those military preparations which
menace Germany and Austria-Hungary._

In this fair-spoken message we unhappily find no suggestion that
Austria would stop its mobilization, or its military operations
against Servia. The untenable position of the Kaiser, to which he
adhered with fatal consistency to the end, was that Austria should be
given the full right to mobilize against Russia as well as Servia, and
that his ally should even be permitted to press its aggressive
operations against Servia by taking possession of its capital and
holding it as a ransom. In the meantime Russia should not make any
military preparations, either to move effectually against Austria in
the event of the failure of negotiations, or even to defend itself.

The Kaiser's suggestion did not even carry with it the implication
that Germany would stop the military preparations that it was then
carrying on in feverish haste, so that the contention of the Kaiser,
however plausibly it was veiled in his telegram, was that _Germany and
Austria_ _should have full freedom to prepare for war against Russia,
while Russia was to tie its hands and await the outcome of further
parleys, with Austrian cannon bombarding Belgrade_.

In this correspondence the Kaiser displayed his recognized ability as
a writer and speaker, for in this rapid-fire exchange of telegrams the
Kaiser was easily the better controversialist.

He assumed the role of a disinterested party, who, at the request of a
litigant, agrees to become an impartial mediator. He was neither. The
Czar had not asked him to be a mediator, although in the later
telegrams the Russian monarch accepted that term. The Czar in his
first telegram had asked the Kaiser as a party to the quarrel "to
restrain your ally from going too far." The Kaiser, having adroitly
accepted a very different role, promptly shifts the responsibility
upon the Czar of embarrassing the so-called "mediation." This enabled
him to assume the attitude of